September 27, 2012 1:55 pm

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson talked about his team’s struggles throwing the ball through three weeks of the regular season.

He acknowledged that he left the pocket early a few times last week against Green Bay, and that’s something he’ll continue to try and improve in the coming weeks.

“I definitely felt like I did that two or three plays in the game where I could have stayed in the pocket longer,” Wilson said. “It’s something I’m always focusing on and working on.

“I know I have the ability to make plays with my feet, too. But I’d rather stay in there and make throws. That’s the first little note I made myself personally as soon as we watched film – just that I make sure to stay in the pocket a little longer, trust it a little longer. And that will develop with time and just the more experience I get.”

Seattle only has six passing plays of 20 or more yards, second-worst in the league. And Wilson has thrown the ball just 75 times this season, which is the lowest amount of passing attempts for a team this season.

With Seattle throwing the ball an average of 25 times a contest, it seems to put an emphasis on making the most of those throws.

“I wouldn’t say more pressure at all,” Wilson said. “I think that we’re doing a good job of handing the ball off to Marshawn and letting him do his thing, and then we get a chance to capitalize on explosive plays, we’ve got to capitalize on those. We’ve just got to a few more explosive plays, and on third down, we’ve just got to make the throw and make the catch, whatever it is. We’ve just been hair off, so that’s fixable for sure.”

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Gregg Bell joined The News Tribune in July 2014. Bell had been the director of writing for the University of Washington's athletic department for four years. He was the senior national sports writer in Seattle for The Associated Press from 2005-10, covering the Seahawks in their first Super Bowl season and beyond. He's also been The Sacramento Bee's beat writer on the Oakland Athletics and Raiders. The native of Steubenville, Ohio, is a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and a 2000 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Feeds

Has PC addressed the penalty problem? Bad officiating or not, they are still committing way too many penalties on offense that are killing drives. If Pete wants to stick with a conservative offensive approach, then it’s a must that they limit the penalties.

This is what we spent all day yesterday talking about. Opening up the offense. RDub HAS the gun, pete just needs to let his shoot it more often. The more he shoots it, the better he gets at using it. Sound familiar to you young guys?

Changes to to Oline with Carp returning as well, that will help too.

Now, with the refs back, I will be interested how many holding calls will go against the Rams O-Line this weekend..

Open it up! Open it up! Enough already! PC has made it clear that his philosophy is run first, protect the ball, and control the clock. It’s an old school ‘smash mouth’ offense. Not as exciting to watch as a ‘light it up’ offense (Green Bay, San Diego, Baltimore) but it obviously gets the job done. PC also acknowledged that he is holding things back on offense, for now. Sounds smart to me, considering that RW is a rookie that is still learning, growing, and gaining confidence week by week. I’m impatient as the next guy that the Seahawks return to the Super Bowl, but you’ve got to admit that things are looking up with an outstanding defense and a conservative offense that is making its mark (pun intended).

The FACT is that Pete is addressing the issue of too many penalties. However, another FACT is that if you look at his NFL coaching career, he consistently has teams that are below average with respect to being penalized.

Again, he IS addressing it, I’m sure, it’s just that this is one area where almost 100 games as an NFL head coach proves him to be rather incompetent in this regard, no matter if he’s coaching in Seattle, New England, or New Jersey.

This is frustrating for all of us (himself included, I would imagine, as all of us in life are better at some things than we are others).

The most disturbing part for this team in the here and now is that with this playcalling on “offense,” they can’t afford to be moved back 5-10 yards all the time and be finding themselves in 3rd and 9 or 3rd and 12 type of situations.

You guys are the ones that pop the biggest fireworks before the sun goes down. Let the sun go down and enjoy the sunset before you shoot off the big guns! Got to build up the rookie or he might get his self blown up!

Pete is addressing the penalty issue McCoy did not play a snap in the 4th due to his being off sides 3 times. The only thing Pete can do is yank em and sit em. Players get that message real quick. I would expect the next time Okung jumps he will get the same treatment.

I’m pretty sure the Holmgren death stare was more effective than the Mr. Happy benching of a clown like McCoy . The stats prove Holmgren knew how to have disciplined teams in comparison to the rest of the league. I think Mr. Happy is “doing all he can do” because he doesn’t know any better otherwise, he’d be doing it and getting better results.

Maybe instead of the throw away pass that seems to be called a lot on 3rd down they should have Wilson fire it 50 yards downfield to Tate or Rice all the time. If it’s caught, it’s actually a gain. If it’s not, well, they are going to be punting on 4th down anyway so who cares?

I am still secretly holding onto a wish that Winslow returns to the Hawks. I think it would be a great opportunity for him to mature into a veteran leader for a young offense, and he could really help us. Evan Moore hasn’t impressed me so far, but that may be in part due to his short time here.

On first down the Seahawks passed 10 times ran 12 times and RW scrambled twice. The TD they scored was on a play action pass on first down. That doesn’t sound like a run run pass offense all you guys keep bitchin about.

I’m just pointing out that out of 22 first down plays they threw the ball on 11 of them nothing skewed about that. As for what I know it’s plenty and I sure as hell don’t beat a point to death and then some like yourself.

I’m an USC alumn and Carroll’s teams here always had lots of penalties, even during the best of times. Maybe he needs to hire a coach or quality control specialist to help him on the subject. I’ve always liked him as a coach but he just doesn’t know how to to get rid of penalties.

Maybe PC’s style of play–never let-up, & all out up-emotions (read: gleeful intensity)–in and of itself simply creates more unpredictables (hence penalties) to a more structured (read: controllable) style, like Mike Holmgren’s, which always has much fewer penalties…but also, despite winning, a more wooden, predictable offensive quality to it still (read: dull), which many of us chaffed at while he was here, hall-of-fame quality though he was, both as a person and as a coach.

If you look up the stats of Carroll’s prior NFL stints in New England and NY, his teams were in the upper half of the league in terms of fewest penalties (in 1999, his Pats had the 7th fewest penalties in the league).

Maybe part of it is that we’re one of the youngest teams in the league.

In any case, it’s obviously a major issue for a team that desperately wants/needs to stay out of long yardage downs.

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